Before
the 19th century very few European Jews emigrated to America. It was
estimated that in 1840 the Jewish population was around 15,000. In
the 1850s an increasing number of German
Jews began arriving in the United States. This included several who
became successful in business such as Joseph
Seligman (banking), Solomon
Loeb (banking), August Belmont
(banking), Isidor Straus
(department stores), Paul Warburg (banking),
Jacob Schiff (banking) and Otto Kahn
(banking). A survey in 1890 revealed that about a half of the German
Jewish population in the United States were in business.
Issac Meyer Wise, who arrived from Germany
in 1846, founded the paper The
Israelite and the Hebrew Union
College for the training of rabbis. Other important religious figures
that arrived at this time included David
Einhorn (1809-1879), Samuel Adler
(1809-1891) and Bernhard Felsenthal
(1822-1908). By 1880 there were 270 synagogues in the United States.
After the assassination
of Alexander II in 1881 there was
a wave of
pogroms in southern Russia against the Jewish community. This led
to a large increase in Jews leaving Russia.
Of these, more than 90 per cent settled in the United States, the
country that was now regarded as their goldene medine (golden land).
These arrivals were not always welcomed by Jews already in America
who feared that they might stimulate an increase in anti-Semitism.
Joseph
Seligman,
the highly successful banker, later recalled how he was refused accommodation
in hotels which previously had accepted him.
Research suggests that over two-thirds of the Jews settled in New
York, Chicago, Boston
and Pennsylvania. Most were unskilled
and were forced to accept low-paid jobs in factories and mines. They
became especially prominant in the rapidly expanding garment industry.
The long hours, low wages and insanitary conditions in this industry
gave it the name "sweated labour". Sidney
Hillman became the leading trade union leader in the garment industry
and eventually became president of the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America (ACWA).
Large numbers of Russians settled in the
Lower East Side of New York. One trade
union
activist, Abraham Cahan, emerged as the
leader of this group and in
1897 Cahan founded the Jewish
Daily Forward and turned it
into a mass-circulation daily. Cahan played a
role in persuading a large number of Jews to join the American
Socialist Party. Others, such as Emma
Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Senya
Fleshin
and Mollie Steimer, became
involved in the emerging anarchist
movement.
There were several very important books written about Russian immigrant
life during this period. This included Yekl,
a Tale of the New York Ghetto
(1896) by Abraham
Cahan
and the The
Promised Land (1912) by Mary
Antin.
Russian immigrants also contributed a great deal to the development
of science and industry. Important figures included the aircraft engineers,
Igor Sikorsky and Alexander
de Seversky, the biologist, Selman Waksman
and the pioneer in the development of television, Vladimir
Zworykin.
In
1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed A.
Mitchell Palmeras his attorney general. Worried
by the revolution that had taken place in Russia in 1917, Palmer became
convinced that Communist agents were planning to overthrow the American
government. Palmer
recruited John Edgar Hoover as his special
assistant and together they used the Espionage
Act (1917) and the Sedition
Act (1918) to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing
organizations.
A.
Mitchell Palmer claimed
that Communist agents from Russia were planning to overthrow the American
government. On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian
Revolution, over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested
in what became known as the Palmer
Raids. Palmer and Hoover found no evidence
of a proposed revolution but large number of these suspects were held
without trial for a long time. The vast majority were eventually released
but 248 other people were deported to Russia.
This included a large number of Jews including Emma
Goldman, Alexander
Berkman
and Mollie
Steimer.
Persecution
of Jews by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s once again increased
a desire to emigrate to the United States. Arrivals included Albert
Einstein, Alfred Adler, Edward
Teller, Karen Horney, Erich
Fromm, Berthold Brecht,
Kurt Weill and Hans Eisler.
In 1880 the Jewish population of the United States was about 250,000.
Over the next forty years more than two million eastern European Jews
- about one-third of the entire Jewish population there - emigrated
to the United States.
19th Century engraving of a Jewish Progom
(1) Mary
Antin, The Promised Land (1912)
The Gentiles used to wonder at us because
we cared so much about religious things about food and Sabbath and
teaching the children Hebrew. They were angry with us for our obstinacy,
as they called it, and mocked us and ridiculed the most sacred things.
There were wise Gentiles who understood. These were educated people,
like Fedora Pavlovna, who made friends with their Jewish neighbors.
They were always respectful and openly admired some of our ways. But
most of the Gentiles were ignorant. There was one thing, however,
the Gentiles always understood, and that was money. They would take
any kind of bribe, at any time. They expected it. Peace cost so much
a year, in Polotzk. If you did not keep on good terms with your Gentile
neighbors, they had a hundred ways of molesting you. If you chased
their pigs when they came rooting up your garden, or objected to their
children maltreating your children, they might complain against you
to the police, stuffing their case with false accusations and false
witnesses. If you had not made friends with the police, the case might
go to court; and there you lost before the trial was called unless
the judge had reason to befriend you.
The czar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and
you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might
do, except pay tribute and die. One positive command he gave us: You
shall love and honor your emperor. In every congregation a prayer
must be said for the czar's health, or the chief of police would close
the synagogue. On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or
the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five
rubles. A decrepit old woman, who lived all alone in a tumble-down
shanty, supported by the charity of the neighborhood, crossed her
paralyzed hands one day when flags were ordered up, and waited for
her doom, because she had no flag. The vigilant policeman kicked the
door open with his great boot, took the last pillow from the bed,
sold it, and hoisted a flag above the rotten roof.
The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family. There
was a poor locksmith who owed the czar three hundred rubles, because
his brother had escaped from Russia before serving his time in the
army. There was no such fine for Gentiles, only for Jews; and the
whole family was liable. Now the locksmith never could have so much
money, and he had no valuables to pawn. The police came and attached
his household goods, everything he had, including his bride's trousseau;
and the sale of the goods brought thirty-five rubles. After a year's
time the police came again, looking for the balance of the czar's
dues. They put their seal on everything they found.
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish
children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred;
and even the lucky ones had their troubles. First, you had to have
a tutor at home, who prepared you and talked all the time about the
examination you would have to pass, till you were scared. You heard
on all sides that the brightest Jewish children were turned down if
the examining officers did not like the turn of their noses. You went
up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy
about that matter of your nose. There was a special examination for
the Jewish candidates, of course: a nine-year-old Jewish child had
to answer questions that a thirteen-year-old Gentile was hardly expected
to answer. But that did not matter so much; you had been prepared
for the thirteen-year-old test. You found the questions quite
easy. You wrote your answers triumphantly - and you received a low
rating, and there was no appeal.
I used to stand in the doorway
of my father's store munching an apple that did not taste good any
more, and watch the pupils going home from school in twos and threes;
the girls in neat brown dresses and black aprons and little stiff
hats, the boys in trim uniforms with many buttons. They had ever so
many books in the satchels on their backs. They would take them out
at home, and read and write, and learn all sorts of interesting things.
They looked to me like beings from another world than mine. But those
whom I envied had their troubles, as I often heard. Their school life
was one struggle against injustice from instructors, spiteful treatment
from fellow students, and insults from everybody. They were rejected
at the universities, where they were admitted in the ratio of three
Jews to a hundred Gentiles, under the same debarring entrance conditions
as at the high school: especially rigorous examinations, dishonest
marking, or arbitrary rulings without disguise. No, the czar did not
want us in the schools.
(2)
In her book Promised Land, Mary
Antin described what it was like to be Jewish in Russia
during the 1880s.
I
remember a time when I thought a pogrom had broken out in our street,
and I wonder that I did not die of fear. It was some Christian holiday,
and we had been warned by the police to keep indoors. Gates were locked;
shutters were barred. Fearful and yet curious, we looked through the
cracks in the shutters. We saw a procession of peasants and townspeople,
led by priests, carrying crosses and banners and images. We lived
in fear till the end of the day, knowing that the least disturbance
might start a riot, and a riot led to a pogrom.
(3)
In an article in The American Magazine , Allen Foreman described
the tenement buildings in the Jewish quarter of Lower East Side, New
York (November, 1888)
They are
great prison-like structures of brick, with narrow doors and windows,
cramped passages and steep rickety stairs. In case of fire they would
be death-traps, for it would be impossible for the occupants of the
crowded rooms to escape by the narrow stairways, and the flimsy fire-escapes
so laden with broken furniture, bales and boxes that they would be
worse than useless. In the hot summer months these fire-escape balconies
are used as sleeping-rooms by the poor wretches who are fortunate
enough to have windows opening upon them.
(4)
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
(1890)
The homes
of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. You are made fully aware
of it before you have travelled the length of a single block in any
of these East End streets, by the whirr of a thousand sewing-machines,
worked at high pressure from earliest dawn until mind and muscle give
out together. Every member of the family, from the youngest to to
the oldest, bears a hand, shut in the qualmy rooms, where meals are
cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, the live-long day. It
is not unusual to find a dozen persons - men, women and children -
at work in a single room.
(5)
New York Hebrew Standard (15th June, 1894)
The thoroughly
acclimated American Jew stands apart from the seething mass of Jewish
immigrants and looks upon them as in a stage of development pitifully
low. He has no religious, social or intellectual sympathies with them.
He is closer to the Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism
of these miserable darkened Hebrews.
(6)
Jane
Addams, Hull House Maps and Papers
(1895)
No trades are so overcrowded as the sewing-trades; for the needle
has ever been the refuge of the unskilled woman. The wages paid throughout
the manufacture of clothing are less than those in any other trade.
The residents of Hull House have carefully investigated many cases,
and are ready to assert that the Italian widow who finishes the cheapest
goods, although she sews from six in the morning until eleven at night,
can only get enough to keep her children clothed and fed; while for
her rent and fuel she must always depend upon charity or the hospitality
of her countrymen.
If the American sewing-woman, supporting herself alone, lives on bread
and butter and tea, she finds a Bohemian woman next door whose diet
of black bread and coffee enables her to undercut. She competes with
a wife who is eager to have home finishing that she may add something
to the family comfort; or with a daughter who takes it that she may
buy a wedding outfit.
The Hebrew tailor, the man with a family to support, who, but for
this competition of unskilled women and girls, might earn a wage upon
which a family could subsist, is obliged, in order to support them
at all, to put his little children at work as soon as they can sew
buttons.
The mother who sews on a gross of buttons for seven cents, in order
to buy a blue ribbon with which to tie up her little daughter's hair,
or the mother who finishes a dozen vests for five cents, with which
to buy her children a loaf of bread, commits unwittingly a crime against
her fellow-workers, although our hearts may thrill with admiration
for her heroism, and ache with pity over her misery.
(7)
Arnold Bennett decribed living conditions
in Lower East Side in his book Your United States (1912).
It
was a custom among all the immigrants to have boarders. A family with
two children rents an apartment of three rooms and then goes ahead
and rents out the kitchen and the living room to two or three boarders.
Sometimes there would be shifts, people would sleep in the daytime,
and the same place would be used by somebody else at night.
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